The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  Jidda means "grandmother" in Arabic, and the city may have gotten its name because tradition holds that the grandmother of all temptresses, the biblical Eve, is buried here—an apt symbol for a country that legally, sexually, and sartorially buries its women alive. (A hard-line Muslim cleric in Iran recently blamed provocatively dressed women for earthquakes, inspiring the New York Post headline SHEIK IT!) According to legend, when Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden, they went their separate ways, Adam ending up in Mecca and Eve in Jidda, with a single reunion. (Original sin reduced to friends with benefits?) Eve's cemetery lies behind a weathered green door in Old Jidda.

  When I suggested we visit, Abdullah smiled with sweet exasperation. It was a smile I would grow all too accustomed to from Saudi men in the coming days. It translated into "No f—ing way, lady."

  "Women are not allowed to go into cemeteries," he told me.

  I had visited Saudi Arabia twice before, and knew it was the hardest place on earth for a woman to negotiate. Women traveling on their own have generally needed government minders or permission slips. A Saudi woman can't even report harassment by a man without having a mahram, or male guardian, by her side. A group of traditional Saudi women, skeptical of any sort of liberalization, recently started an organization called My Guardian Knows What's Best for Me. I thought I understood the regime of gender apartheid pretty well. But this cemetery bit took me aback.

  "Can they go in if they're dead?" I asked.

  "Women can be buried there," he conceded, "but you are not allowed to go in and look into it."

  So I can only see a dead woman if I'm a dead woman?

  No wonder they call this the Forbidden Country. It's the most bewitching, bewildering, beheading vacation spot you'll never vacation in.

  Hello—Good-Bye!

  Saudi Arabia is one of the premier pilgrimage sites in the world, outstripping Jerusalem, the Vatican, Angkor Wat, and every other religious destination, except for India's Kumbh Mela (which attracts as many as 50 million pilgrims every three years). Millions of Muslims flock to Mecca and Medina annually. But, for non-Muslims, it's another story. Saudi Arabia has long kept not just its women but its very self behind a veil. Robert Lacey, the Jidda-based author of The Kingdom and Inside the Kingdom, explains that only when revenues from the hajj pilgrims fell drastically, during the Depression, did the Saudis allow infidel American engineers to enter the country and start exploring for oil.

  Before 9/11, Saudi Arabia was in fact gearing up to welcome, or at least accept, a trickle of non-Muslim visitors, dropping a handkerchief to the world. Crown Prince Abdullah—now the king—was a radical modernizer by Saudi standards. He wanted to encourage more outside contact and to project an image other than one of religious austerity (with bursts of terrorism). The Saudis had already cracked open the door slightly for some degree of cultural tourism. Leslie McLoughlin, a fellow at the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, led tours to the Kingdom in 2000 and 2001, and both groups included affluent and curious Jewish men and women from New York. But on 9/11 the passageway narrowed again as Saudi Arabia and the United States confronted the reality that Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen terrorist hijackers were Saudi nationals.

  The news cut to the very character of the Saudi state. Back in 1744, the oasis-dwelling al-Saud clan had made a pact with Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect, which took an especially strict approach to religious observance. The warrior al-Sauds got religious legitimacy; the anhedonic Wahhabis got protection. To this day the Koran is the constitution of Saudi Arabia, and Wahhabism its dominant faith. The royals doubled down on the deal when Islamic fundamentalists took over the Grand Mosque, in Mecca, in 1979. Now, with bin Laden's attacks, the bargain the royals struck with the fundamentalists—allowing anti-Western clerics and madrassas to flourish and not cracking down on those who bankroll al-Qaeda and terrorism—had borne its poison fruit.

  Three years after 9/11, in 2004, the Kingdom decided to give the tourism business another try, this time hiring a public relations firm to get things rolling. The website of the resulting Supreme Commission for Tourism was "a disaster," one Saudi official abashedly recalls, shaking his head. The site noted that visas would not be issued to an Israeli passport holder, to anyone with an Israeli stamp on a passport, or, just in case things weren't perfectly clear, to "Jewish people." There were also "important instructions" for any woman coming to the Kingdom on her own, advising that she would need a husband or a male sponsor to pick her up at the airport, and that she would not be allowed to drive a car unless "accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver." Needless to say, there would be no drinking allowed—Saudi officials even try to enforce no-drinking rules on private jets in Saudi airspace, sometimes sealing the liquor cabinets. Finally, belying the fact that Arabs consider hospitality a sacred duty, there was the no-loitering kicker: "All visitors to the Kingdom must have a return ticket." After New York congressman Anthony Weiner kicked up a fuss, the anti-Semitic language on the website was removed.

  Now, six years later, the Saudis are trying yet again. But they aren't opening their arms unless (with a few exceptions) you are part of a special tourist group. "No backpacking stuff," says Prince Sultan bin Salman, the tall and chatty former astronaut who is the president and chairman of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities. "You know, high level," he goes on, and involving only "fully educated" groups.

  You still have to accept all the restrictive rules. And it won't be easy getting in. Visas these days for Westerners are so scarce that even top American diplomats have a hard time obtaining them for family members. The Kingdom recoils at the thought of the culture clash that could be caused by an invasion of French girls in shorts and American boys with joints. A sign at the airport warns: DRUG TRAFFICKERS WILL BE PUT TO DEATH.

  Saudis fret that the rest of the world sees them as aliens, even though many are exceptionally charming and welcoming once you actually breach the wall. They are sensitive about being judged for their Flintstones ways, and are quick to remind you of what happened to the shah of Iran when he tried to modernize too fast. Not to mention their own King Faisal, who was assassinated in 1975 (regicide by nephew) after he introduced television and public education for girls. This prince-and-pauper society has always had a Janus face. Royals fly to the South of France to drink, gamble, and sleep with Russian hookers, while reactionary clerics at home delegitimize women and demonize Westerners. Last winter, a Saudi prince found himself under arrest for allegedly strangling his servant in a London hotel. (He has pleaded not guilty.) The Kingdom didn't have widespread electricity until the 1950s. It didn't abolish slavery until the 1960s. Restrictions on mingling between unrelated members of the opposite sex remain severe. (Recently, a Saudi cleric advised men who come in regular contact with unrelated women to consider drinking their breast milk, thereby making them in a sense "relatives," and allowing everyone to breathe a sigh of relief.) Today, Saudi Arabia is trying to take a few more steps ahead—starting a coed university, letting women sell lingerie to women, even toning down the public beheadings. If you're living on Saudi time, akin to a snail on Ambien, the popular eighty-six-year-old King Abdullah is making bold advances. To the rest of the world, the changes are almost imperceptible.

  "Lots of Attentions"

  The idea of seeing Saudi Arabia with the welcome mat out was irresistible—even when the wary Saudis kept resisting. I made plans for a Saudi vacation, knowing that the only thing more invigorating than ten days in Saudi Arabia would be ten days there as a woman. Actually, it would be two women: joining me was my intrepid colleague and trip photographer Ashley Parker. I was a little squeamish about boarding a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight with a cross on my forehead. (It was Ash Wednesday.) Some Saudi flights embark with an Arabic supplication, in the words of the Prophet Muhammad. The flight attendants—who are not Saudi, because it would be dishonorable for the airline to employ Saudi women—bring
around baskets of Saudi newspapers. A glance at the headlines underscored the fact that we were in a time machine hurtling backward. One article in the English-language Arab News was titled "Carrying Dagger a Mark of Manliness." Another warned, "Women lawyers are not welcome in the Kingdom's courts." It was startling to see a thumbnail portrait of a female columnist—my counterpart—in which only her eyes were not concealed by a veil. Reading the airline magazine is like the moment in The Twilight Tone when you sense there's something slightly off about that picture-book town. The magazine is called Ahlah Wasahldn, meaning "Hello and Welcome," but the welcome seems to be to Versailles, Provence, and Belize. There's no hint that Saudi Arabia itself might be a destination.

  The in-flight movies offer a taste of things to come. If you order The Proposal, you get a blurry blob over Sandra Bullock's modest décolletage, and even her clavicles, and the male stripper scene and the erection joke have vanished altogether. A curtained partition goes up so that Saudi women can nap without their abayas. There's no alcohol onboard, although some veteran business travelers en route to the Kingdom order vodkas at the airport bar and pour them into a water bottle for sustenance along the way. At the airport in Riyadh, the gender segregation ratchets up. There's a Ladies' Waiting Room and a Ladies' Prayer Room. If there hadn't been a Saudi majordomo to come and collect us, we would have been in limbo—a pair of single women wandering the airport with no man to get them out, trapped forever like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

  In America, you get chocolates in your hotel room. In Riyadh, you might get a gift bag from your hosts in the Kingdom with something to slip into for dinner—a long black abaya and a black headscarf that make you look like a mummy and feel like a pizza oven. And even then they'll stick you behind a screen or curtain in the "family" section of the restaurant. The big Gloria Steinem advance in recent years is that women now wear abayas with dazzling designs on the back (sometimes with thousands of dollars' worth of Swarovski crystals) or Burberry or zebra-patterned trim on the sleeves.

  I respect Islam's mandate for modest clothing. But I don't see why I have to adopt a dress code, as Aaron Sorkin put it on The West Wing, that makes "a Maryknoll nun look like Malibu Barbie." Needless to say, Barbie herself was banned in Saudi Arabia, though I did see Barbie paraphernalia for sale in a Riyadh supermarket and a Barbie-like doll, accessorized with headscarf and abaya (and of course not in a box with Ken), in the National Museum gift shop. As for Hello! magazine, a recent import to the Kingdom, Saudi censors paste small white squares of paper on the models' glossy thighs.

  Soon after our arrival I asked Prince Sultan bin Salman, the tourism minister, about the dress code for foreigners. "Well, the abaya is part of the uniform," he said. "It's part of enjoying the culture. I've seen people who go to India dress up in the Indian sari." Najla Al-Khalifah, a member of the prince's staff in the female section of the tourist bureau, offered another analogy: "You can't wear shorts for the opera. You must dress for the occasion. If you don't like it, don't go." Fair enough, but if you do wear shorts to the opera, you won't get arrested by the roving outriders of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—that is, the mutawa, or religious police.

  Being in purdah pricks more deeply when you're dealing with American-owned enterprises—it's as if your own people are in sexist cahoots with your captors. In 2008, covering President Bush's trip to the Middle East, I was standing next to ABC's Martha Raddatz at the desk at the Riyadh Marriott when she angrily pressed the clerk about getting into the gym. He gave her The Smile. How about never, lady? On this trip, at Budget Rent a Car, the man at the counter explained to me that women could rent cars only if they paid extra for a driver. (And, to boot, it would be dishonorable for a woman to sit in the passenger seat unless a male relative were driving.) When I said I could drive myself, the man's head fell back in helpless laughter. I enlisted Nicolla Hewitt, a gorgeous, statuesque blonde New Yorker on business in Saudi Arabia, to join me in a brief sit-in at the men's section of Starbucks in the upscale Kingdom Centre mall. Her head was swirling with lurid news accounts of a Western woman who had been dragged from a Starbucks for committing the crime of attempted equality. "If I see the bloody mutawa," she said, gripping her latte nervously, "I'm hoofing it."

  At various establishments I began amusing myself by seeing how long it took for male Cerberuses to dart forward and block the way to the front sections reserved for men. At McDonald's, dourly observing my arrival, a janitor barred the door with a broom in two seconds flat. At the posh Al Faisaliah Hotel, in Riyadh, I was asking the maître d' why I couldn't sit with the businessmen when he suddenly caught sight of an elegant woman sashaying through the men's section. He made a Reggie Bush run to knock her out of bounds before turning back to thwart my own entrance with a Baryshnikov leap. I did manage a moment of Pyrrhic triumph in the deserted men's section in the lobby café of the Jidda Hilton, ordering a cappuccino, but then the waiter informed me that he couldn't serve it until I moved five feet back to the women's section.

  Hotel desk clerks would warn me to put on my abaya merely to walk across the lobby, even when I was wearing my most modest floor-length navy dress, the one reserved for family funerals. "You will get lots of attentions—not good attentions," one clerk said. Not wearing an abaya can be hazardous—but so can wearing one. Signs on the mall escalators caution women to be careful not to get their cloaks caught in the moving stairs. (A Muslim woman was recently choked to death by her hijab while on holiday in Australia; it had gotten caught in a go-cart at high speed.) You soon become paranoid, worrying that if you open the door for room service wearing a terry-cloth robe, you'll end up in the stocks. But the top hotels are staffed by foreign men—something I realized must be the case when my butler at the Al Faisaliah folded my underwear unprompted. If I were buttled by a Saudi, we'd probably be shuttled to Deera Square—or Chop Chop Square, as it's better known—where the public beheadings occur. It's the one with the big drain, which the Saudis claim is for rain.

  Sunny Side of Repression

  The first time I traveled to Saudi Arabia was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, had invited me to come over and see for myself that not all Saudis are terrorists. On that trip, I was more heedless and cavalier. I wore a hot-pink skirt, with fringe, to go to an interview with the Saudi education minister. When I came down from my hotel room, the men in the lobby glared with such hostility that I thought they'd pelt me to death with their dates. My minder turned me back to the elevator. "Go get your abaya!" he yelled. "They'll kill you!" (My Guardian Knew What Was Best for Me.) This was right around the time when fifteen Saudi schoolgirls had died in a fire because the mutawa wouldn't let them escape without their headscarves and abayas, a horrifying episode that shook the Kingdom. Confronted by carloads of screaming men whenever I wore my own clothes, I added more layers but still got into trouble. I was swathed in black with a headscarf at a mall next to the Al Faisaliah Hotel when four members of the mutawa bore down. They barked in Arabic that they could see my neck and the outline of my body, and they confiscated my passport. All this was happening against the backdrop of a storefront underwear display featuring a lacy red teddy. My companion, the suave Adel al-Jubeir, an adviser to King Abdullah and now the Saudi ambassador to Washington, managed to retrieve the passport and obtain permission for me to leave the mall (and the country), but it took a disconcertingly long time.

  With each incident, you feel more cowed and less eager to defy the dress-to-repress rules. For this trip, I had an abaya made so I wouldn't have to swelter inside the standard polyester ones in the baking heat. I didn't go for anything as gauzy as Dorothy Lamour's in The Road to Morocco. I wanted simple black linen. But the tailor tried too hard to give it a flattering shape, adding slits so high they could get my throat slit. When I wore it, my minders pestered me to put an abaya over my abaya. It reminded me of Martin Short's mischievous question about Hillary Clinton's nightwear: "Does she have
a pantsuit on under her pantsuit?"

  Still, this time around, I decided to look on the sunny side of repression. Feel guilty about not jogging? Don't even try! Tired of running off to every new exhibition? Lucky you—there aren't any art museums! Can't decide which sybaritic treatment to select at the hotel spa? Relax—the spa's just for men. And you never have to stress about a bad-hair day.

  The two words you'll quickly learn are haled (permissible) and haram (forbidden)—the kosher and nonkosher of the Arab world. Since your old pastimes are now mostly haram, you'll have to pick up some new vices. Gorge on gamy camel bacon at Friday brunch. (Friday is the Muslim Sunday.) Develop a new obsession with tweezing and threading your eyebrows and blackening your Bedouin bedroom eyes—now literally the windows to the soul. Enjoy a country that is the last refuge of indoor smoking. I went to the cigar bar at the fancy Globe restaurant in Riyadh and enjoyed a "Churchill's Cabinet" stogie for 180 riyals ($50), with its "lovely notes of leather and cream, hints of coffee, citrus, and spice." To go along with beluga caviar and Maine-lobster snacks there was an elaborate wine presentation, with the waiter showing off the label of a nonalcoholic Zinfandel before nestling it in a silver ice bucket. "It's from California," he said proudly. I fell into tippling in the morning, starting the day with Saudi champagne, a saccharine apple juice concoction.

  You might also want to emulate the spoiled Saudi set and just loll about until the sun sets, watching The Bold and the Beautiful or Glenn Beck on satellite TV. (There are no public movie theaters.) The Saudis have a homegrown version of the Today show in English, with their own Meredith Vieira in headscarf, promoting buttocks exercises and colon cleansing, and a hefty Martha Stewart doppelgänger in a babushka, baking dried-apricot sandwiches in flower shapes. It's all very cozy, even if the crawl underneath is crawling with less-than-flattering stories about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. One night, deciding to take a risk, I smuggled a young Saudi man up to my hotel room to translate some of the scary-looking rants on TV by guys in thobes and kaffiyehs. Were they trashing the Great Satan? He told me that the serious-looking bearded guy talking a mile a minute was merely chatting about soccer, and another scowling fellow with intense brown eyes was just praying. Likely story.